Paul Horgan
PAUL HORGAN is known as "the Dean of southwestern writers."
1
For over fifty years, beginning
in the 1930s and extending into the 1980s, Horgan has written
fiction, history, biography–even the libretto for
a folk opera–about the people and places of the Southwest.
Two of his histories about the Southwest, Great River and
Lamy of Santa Fe, have won Pulitzer Prizes. Numerous other
local and national writing awards and honors attest to his recognition
as a western writer. Despite the fact that many of Horgan's novels
and short stories have the East as their setting, his image as
a western writer prevails among most readers of western American
literature. But Horgan insists that he is transcontinental and
not a champion of any one place for its own sake, not reducible
to easy classification–be it Catholic writer, realist, or
regionalist–East or West.
Pursuing this apparent contradiction between how Horgan is perceived
by the common reader and how he perceives himself leads to a
broader understanding of regionalism and of Horgan's writing.
He is a southwestern writer; however, he is also something more:
an artist who happens to write about the places he has lived
in and knows. But Horgan's Southwest is not incidental to his
character as a man and as a writer. As inspiration and as theme,
Horgan's Southwest is an integral and reciprocal part of his
America and his perception and rendering of it.
A look at a few of Horgan's many remarks on regionalism reveals
that he does not repudiate it as such, categorically. Part of
Horgan's reluctance to accept regionalist designation involves
what he sees as the stereotype of a southwestern writer as a
cowboy writer; Horgan is definitely not a cowboy. Oliver La Farge
implied in a review of Horgan's Centuries of Santa Fe that
Horgan was somehow less authentic and convincing as a western
author because he chose to live outside the Southwest and was
"much too formal a dresser."
Much more an advocate of "high"
culture and its values than popular culture, Horgan believes
that the originally innocent and unselfconscious concept of regionalism
has been corrupted by, among other things, the commercializations
of the media to the extent that, "Where once the term stood
for uncommonized local ways, it now stands for any almost comic
cartoon-like view of the varied lifestyles to be found in the
physical variations of our land."
4
Horgan is much more interested
in probing the universally human in his writing than he is in
stressing regional differences. And he insists that in the creation
of his novels and histories a consideration of the appropriate
form in which to contain truth has always preceded regionalism,
which does not have "much determining relevance to this
interest."
5
So what relevance does place, does
the Southwest, have in Horgan's lifelong search for beauty and
truth? If not a "determining relevance," Horgan's Southwest
has considerable relevance to his life and art.
Born in Buffalo, New York on August 1, 1903, and raised in a
GermanIrish family of amateur writers, actors, musicians and
painters, Horgan acquired his sense of culture in the East and
not the West. As he explains it, "I have derived most of
my education informally from the cultural expressions best exemplified
in the intellectual and artistic life of the East and of Europe,
and I have been concerned with people without regard exclusively
to the `typical' character imposed on either eastern or western
environment by other writers or observers."
When, because of his father's tuberculosis, Horgan moved to Albuquerque,
New Mexico in 1915 at the age of twelve, the eastern and European
"cultural expressions" he had experienced up to that time,
such as they were, met with the "otherness" of Native American
and Mexican American cultures. The Spanish and Catholic cultural
expressions in New Mexico were essentially more familiar–as
were those of other AngloAmericans living there. The landscape
was utterly alien.
In a sense, this move to the West provided for Horgan a microcosmic
model of the third stage (i.e., the Anglo-American) in the colonization
of the Southwest which Horgan, seemingly in accord with the frontier
themes of Frederick Jackson Turner, writes about in Great
River and The Heroic Triad, in From the Royal City
and The Centuries of Santa Fe, in Josiah Gregg,
Lamy of Santa Fe and other of his writings. The Common
Heart and the final novel in his Richard trilogy, The
Thin Mountain Air, seen as "Albuquerque" novels, fictionalize
Horgan's biographical move West. Although more "interregional,"
Main Line West is also an Albuquerque novel. And most
if not all of his novels and short stories about the West have
something to do with some phase or aspect of either Hispanic
or Anglo-American colonization of the region over three centuries.
A place with even more relevance
to Horgan's Southwest is Roswell and the Pecos Valley area of
southeastern New Mexico. Much more like West Texas in its ambiance
than the northern cities of Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Taos, Horgan's
Roswell is depicted in numerous short stories in The Return
of the Weed, Figures in a Landscape, and The Peach Stone;
and in the novels A Lamp on the Plains, Far from Cibola,
and Whitewater. The folk
opera, A Tree on the Plains, is essentially Roswell too.
Roswell's New Mexico Military Institute
figures prominently in Horgan's Southwest for several reasons.
First, Horgan was a cadet there from 1919 to 1921 and from 1922
to 1923. Next, he was librarian at the Institute between 1926
and 1942. And it was in these almost two decades at a military
school that Horgan somewhat ironically discovered himself as
a writer (after a time at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester,
New York from 1923 to 1926 studying voice and working in stage
production)–as a cadet meeting and collaborating with his
lifelong friend, Peter Hurd; and later writing more than one
unpublished and twelve published books there.
During his tenure as librarian, Horgan's colleague at the Institute
Maurice Garland Fulton also was a stimulus to Horgan's southwestern
writing, and they joined together on a special kind of state
history text, New Mexico's Own Chronicle–all primary
sources with splendid arrangement and incisive commentary–and
on the Diary and Letters of Josiah Gregg, for which Horgan
wrote a long introductory biography later incorporated into Josiah
Gregg and His Vision of the Early West.
Horgan resigned as librarian in 1942 to serve in the Pentagon
as a General Staff Corps officer in charge of disseminating various
information to U.S. Army troops. After leaving the Army in 1946
as a Lt. Colonel, Horgan taught at the University of Iowa for
a semester and then returned to New Mexico Military Institute
as Assistant to the President. A Guggenheim fellowship in 1947
allowed him to devote his full attention to his major work, Great
River, and the next stage of his career as historian and
novelist.
Santa Fe, in addition to Albuquerque and Roswell, is another
place of some relevance to an understanding of Horgan's Southwest.
During Horgan's first years in New Mexico, from 1915 until 1923,
that is, during his teenage years, he frequently visited Santa
Fe and was influenced by what he felt to be the European and
Romanesque aspects of the city, left in large part by Jean Baptiste
Lamy, the first bishop and archbishop of Santa Fe. Horgan during
that impressionable time also was surprised to come across Willa
Cather at work, he guesses, on her novel about Lamy, Death
Comes for the Archbishop.
Horgan has much in common with Cather as novelist (and with their
mutual subject, Lamy)–in their cultural attitudes, in their
remote Wests of New Mexico and Nebraska, in their sensitivity
toward the aesthetic power of the Southwest's vast and lonely
landscapes. Cather is at the top of Horgan's list of favorite western writers.
Next comes Harvey Fergusson, whom Horgan knew and admired in
Albuquerque, and William Goyen.
8
Horgan's address, "Willa Cather
and the Incalculable Distance," given before the Century Association
in the spring of 1978, affords further evidence of his deep appreciation
of Cather's biography and her art as a "literary migrant."9
In his analysis of Cather's visual
world and "place-pictures" and her "regionalism," Horgan's
kinship with Cather becomes even more obvious. Horgan sees the
determining aspect of Cather's writing to be her "aspiration"
(evidenced in characters like Lucy Gayheart) to travel the "incalculable
distance" from country to city, "between the mundane binding
of life and the utmost freedom and exaltation."
10
In Horgan's Southwest, it is perhaps
not too farfetched to think of Santa Fe as the northern city,
distant from the comparatively more provincial, younger Roswell,
filled with all New Mexico had to offer of "exaltation,"
of history and European culture, and of other writers who congregated
there. Certainly in Roswell Horgan developed on his own terms
his view of the Southwest. If, however, as Horgan suggests, part
of Cather's own "incalculable distance" was the aspiration
to bring civility and cultivation to remoteness through her writing,
part of Horgan's "incalculable distance" was to live the
civilized artist's life in the remoteness of Roswell. He also
lived it in the Santa Fe of Cather and Witter Bynner and later,
in the 1950s and '60s, through support of such an expression
of high culture as the Santa Fe Opera, and in recounting in his
many books the centuries of Indian, Hispanic and Anglo-American
culture which had come to Santa Fe and the Rio Grande.
Horgan's history of the Southwest seen metaphorically through
the Rio Grande, Great River, marks a kind of midway point in
his life and work; and, aside from the later A Distant Trumpet,
Lamy of Santa Fe, Whitewater, The Thin Mountain Air, and
Mexico Buy, Horgan in 1954 turned again to works with
settings other than the Southwest. This is not to suggest that
Horgan's writing before Great River is southwestern and
that published subsequently is eastern. Far from it. From Horgan's
first published novels, The Fault of Angels and No
Quarter Given, most of his fiction mixes, at least in some
proportion, West and East. But in the early 1960s Horgan took
up residence in Connecticut, first as a Fellow at Wesleyan University's
Center for Advanced Studies, and then as its director–and
after that, in 1967, as a professor of English and writer in
residence. The Southwest now became for Horgan a place for yearly
visits, when possible, and for rememberings of his former life.
It would seem, then, that the years Horgan spent in Albuquerque,
Roswell and Santa Fe between 1915 and 1942, and from 1946 to
1960, established the biographical and imaginative boundaries
of his Southwest. A more detailed consideration of some of his
writings should help map
Horgan's Southwest.
During the late 1920s, the 1930s and into the early '40s Horgan's Southwest began to take shape in his novels, for example, The Fault of Angels (1933), No Quarter Given (1935), Main Line West (1936), A Lamp on the Plains (1937), Far from Cibola (1938), The Habit of Empire (1938), and The Common Heart (1942). It also played a role in his short fiction, as found in The Return of the Weed (1936) and Figures in a Landscape (1940), and in essays, poetry, reviews and "word-pictures" or descriptive sketches in such journals and publications as Folk-Say, B. A. Botkin's "regional miscellany"; T. M. Pearce's and Telfair Hendon's America in the Southwest: A Regional Anthology; The New Mexico Quarterly, edited by Pearce; John McGinnis's Southwest Review; The New Mexico Sentinel, published by Cyrus McCormick; Laughing Horse, known as a "dilatory" journal of the Southwest and edited by Willard "Spud" Johnson; The Yale Review, Poetry magazine, and numerous others.
Horgan's ability to see western
lands with a painter's eye–a talent he has nurtured throughout
his career by literally painting many of his "field notes"
for his books and then incorporating their feelings and detail
in lyrical descriptions and evocations of landscape–is evidenced
in a series of ten "American Landscapes" done in 1936 for
the New Mexico Quarterly and other "American Pictures"
done in 1937 for The New Mexico Sentinel.
One of these word pictures (done, Horgan suggests,
in tempera on gesso, a technique perfected by Hurd in his landscapes),
entitled "Divide in the Rockies," attempts to capture three
feelings of elevation and distance
and transcendent escape, where the "world falls away":
First is the feeling of universal light, light
as a part of air, light from over and under the world both. Second
is the feeling of starry bleakness, wonderful and not habitable,
bare rock and wind driven gray wood. Third is the roll of land
on the known earth; and there feeling takes color, and is recognized
in its green of timber, its blue of valleys, its tawny plains,
and its silver vein of running river bearing the wonder of the
look outward forever.
11
Horgan attempts consistently to give the reader a sense of place
in what he refers to as "painterly" terms such as this.
His "Pages From a Rio Grande Notebook," which serve as a
prologue to The Heroic Triad, and served him in the writing
of Great River, are perhaps the most conspicuous instances of
this technique.
12
Horgan, however, uses the technique
throughout his fiction as well.
Horgan's poem "Westward" is another example of his talent
for the imagistic evocation of landscape.
Several essay reviews on books about the Southwest also point
to the importance of landscape in literature for Horgan. Long
a friendly journal, ever since Horgan saw his first published
story appear there in December of 1929, The Yale Review ran
many Horgan reviews in the early 1930s. Interesting to readers
of western American literature are Horgan's responses to the
books of Erna and Harvey Fergusson and John G. Neihardt. Horgan
recognizes Erna Fergusson's Dancing Gods as a fine book
"devoted to America's regional exposition," filled with
"historical background of the Southwest in which her lyrical
appreciations of the country and its heritage are valuable. .
. when she enables us to visualize the dances as she describes
them."
Three of Horgan's Folk-Say contributions also focus on
southwestern land and people: "Episodes from the Passionate
Land" ( 1929), "The Witch" (1930), and "Figures in
a Landscape" (1931). In "Episodes" Horgan follows the changes
Christianity brings in the lives of Isleta Indians and their
pueblo near Albuquerque–the superstition surrounding the
rising of the coffin of a murdered priest in the Isleta church,
the Christmas Eve dance and procession at the church prior to
Midnight Mass, the prayerful requests of Jenny Chi'wi'wi for
her family and their simple blessings. Probably occasioned in
part by Erna Fergusson's taking Horgan to Isleta one Christmas
Eve to see the ceremonies inviting the Christ Child to the village,
Horgan's triptych is a beautiful reflection not only of the passion
in the Indian people and place he writes about but also of the
passionate impact "place" had on a "Catholic northeasterner."
As a prelude to Horgan's 1940 collection of short fiction by
the same title, Folk-Say's "Figures in a Landscape"
is another "suite" of five sketches of Pecos Valley old-timer
character types and locale. Framing everything is a sweeping
account of a thunder storm descending on "The Landscape,"
the sky, the plain, El Capitán mountain, the towns of
the valley, the people's lives and romances: "The green
valley; the plain, subject to the sky; the foothills broken with
deep green patches of scrub pine, piñon, hardy crawling
plants; the mountainsides climbing into the blue–your lovers
are your conquerors."
19
Violet Soulder, the "Tularosa
Bobcat," sister to bad man Jing Soulder, and herself "the
only Female Cattle Rustler in New Mexico," is one of the lovers
and conquerors. She lives into old age and legend in the homeland
of Billy the Kid. Old Lady McDonny is another. At the age of
eighty-plus, on her deathbed, she relives the pioneering pains
and joys of crossing Kansas and coming to the Pecos Valley sixty
years before. Her children stand around her listening in silence
as she thanks God for her life and its struggle. And "The
Captain" is a former Ranger who met his dangers with as much
style and wit as brawn. He wears no boots or sword as a
rancher and banker today. But in his demeanor
is all the authority he once commanded "when Tombstone was
the headquarters of hell." Juanita is another Pecos Valley personage–a
girl who leaves the village of Arabella for work in town, the
adoption of American talk and ways and a reputation as "Hot
St'ff": "`You tellem keed.' `Wa' thi h-h-hell!' `I don'
geeve a hell por nada!"' What she does want is to become "a
married American woman" with a car. Attaining that for a time
until her bus-driver husband leaves her, she heads finally for
El Paso and the life of a prostitute–"Light red silk
underwear, a white fur coat, slippers with decorations of ostrich
feathers, a gold bed, and expensive perfume–why not?" Blending
satire with stereotype, Horgan as early as 1931 was, through
his observations and writing, turning life around Roswell into
his own special imaginative Southwest.
Never at a loss for material, Horgan had not only his present
but the whole past history–Indian, Spanish, Mexican-American,
Anglo-American–of the Southwest to make his own. His 1933
essay for the Southwest Review, "About the Southwest:
A Panorama of Nueva Granada," is perhaps the most seminal of
all his early writings, for it provides the large design for
his encompassing vision of the Southwest, a vision that would
lend itself to combined expression in fiction and non-fiction–a
lifetime of possible topics and variations. In one long passionate
concluding sentence from that essay, seeking in his very style
to reflect the magnitude of the
place, Horgan tells how and why the Southwest exists for him:
It [the Southwest] exists upon realities because
the land is so tremendous, so bare of human life in so many million
acres, because there are so many plains rising sharply to mountainhood,
so much communion between sky and earth with great slow-sailing
clouds and stars that watch the night like near eyes; because
to go from one place to another it is necessary so very often
to drive in cars along lonely roads with nothing in sight but
the gently lifting and falling horizons of low hills; because
the conditions of natural life raise no clamor like that sustained
daily by tiring nerves in other regions; because, no matter what
the manner of people, they must be moved by the beauty of Texas
plains and Oklahoma wheat fields and New Mexico mountains and
Arizona deserts alike; and because, though the survivals are
only travesties to be noticed amidst the developments of our
time, the color of past splendors of race and deed is mixed with
the land by the agency of our
imaginations; and we pay it tribute, as it nourishes us.
20
How the Southwest as theme and
inspiration nourished Horgan through five decades into the 1980s,
through hundreds of thousands of words in short stories, novels,
histories, biographies to a body of work and achievement that
merits Horgan's being called the "Dean of southwestern writers"
cannot be traced here. But it is clear that throughout his career
the Southwest has meant very much to Horgan–close to being
a "determining relevance." There is much of him in all of
his southwestern heroes.
For all of the characters with whom Horgan sympathizes and seems
to identify, there is a greater world beyond the remoteness and
loneliness of the Southwest. Traveling Cather's "incalculable
distance" is something Horgan's protagonists invariably must
do, either bringing the civilities of the East to the West or
leaving the West for the East–both of which Horgan himself
was compelled to do. The Southwest thus becomes a "world
elsewhere," in Richard Poirier's terms, that is ambivalently
attractive and repellent, a free and spacious place to escape
to for a new start, and a small, culturally confining place to
escape from when greater amenities call. If, as Poirier says,
"Themost interesting American books are an image of the
creation of America itself, of the effort . . . to `Build therefore
your own world,'"
Whitewater, The Thin Mountain Air, and Mexico Bay are
Horgan's most recent, and it can be argued, his best novels about
the American Southwest. They show Horgan's powers, as an artist
who draws much of his inspiration from his travels and times
in New Mexico and Texas, in seemingly perpetual ascendancy even
now as he enters the eighth decade of the century and the eightieth
year of his life.
Although The Thin Mountain Air is more truly a part of
the Richard Trilogy and in general portrays the town of Albuquerque
and the ambiance of northern New Mexico as Horgan (Richard in
the novel) knew it through the events surrounding his own father's
illness and the family's move to that climate and region, it
also forms a key portion of Horgan's dramatizations of Texas
as it looks and feels and sounds in Whitewater and Mexico
Bay. The town of Belvedere in the West Texas of Whitewater
and the presence of Amarillo in Mexico Bay–and
to some extent, even the Rio Grande and Gulf Coast scenes in
Mexico Bay–serve as imaginative projections of Roswell,
the "Little Texas" area of southwestern New Mexico which
was so important to him during his years at the New Mexico Military
Institute, both as a young cadet and later as librarian. Thus,
both northern and southeastern New Mexico are transposed into
the locales of his Texas novels and together make up his Southwest.
For that matter, much the same thing can be said about his Texas
fiction in The Peach Stone.
It is no startling revelation to suggest that both the people
and the places of Horgan's Southwest, the "lives and the
landscapes" as he calls
them, are composite combinations of his real
life experiences and his artist's imagination. It is not especially
earthshaking to suggest that Horgan is in his own characters,
and that they enjoy with him, and with those readers who come
to share, perhaps revisit, the Southwest through his novels and
other writings, an exhilaration and affirmation of the significance
of life in that enchanting and magnificent portion of the country.
Even so, to read the southwestern works of Paul Horgan is to
come profoundly alive to that world as an artist constantly,
decade after decade, remembers and reworks its ordinary and sublime
vistas and solitudes. If ever a western writer was a match for
his subject, his region, so much a match that the subject–character,
setting, theme, and imagery–became a symbol of the larger
significance of westering, then that writer is Paul Horgan,
"the Dean of southwestern writers"–and then some.
ROBERT GISH, University of Northern Iowa
Notes 1. Lawrence Clark Powell, Great Constellations (El Paso: El Paso Public Library Association, 1977), p. 4.
2. Oliver La Farge, review in The New York Times Book Review, October 7, 1956, p. 4.
3. Paul Horgan, Peter Hurd: A Portrait Sketch From Life (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), p. 57.
4. Paul Horgan, "The Pleasures and Perils of Regionalism," Western American Literature 8 (Winter 1974): 169.
5. J. Golden Taylor, ed., "The Western Novel–A Symposium," The Literature of the American West (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), p. 41. Reprinted from the South Dakota Review (Autumn 1964).
6. The Literature of the American West, p. 40.
7. Paul Horgan, "In Search of the Archbishop," The Catholic Historical Rewiew 46 (January 1961): 411–414.
8. The Literature of the American West, pp. 30–31.
9. Paul Horgan, "Willa Cather and the Incalculable Distance," address to the Century Association, April 25, 1978, unpublished.
10. "Willa Cather and the Incalculable Distance."
11. Paul Horgan, "American Landscapes," The New Mexico Quarterly 6 (August 1936): 167.
12. See Paul Horgan, "Pages From a Rio Grande Notebook," in The Heroic Triad (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), pp. 3–19.
13. Paul Horgan, "Westward," Poetry 43 (December 1933): 144–149.
14. Paul Horgan, review in The Yale Review 22 (September 1932): 206.
15. Ibid: 207.
16. The Yale Review 23 (September 1933): 212.
17. Paul Horgan, "Episodes from the Passionate Land," in Folk-Say (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1929), pp. 120–124. For Horgan's account of his Isleta trip, see Paul Horgan, "Erna Fergusson and New Mexico," in her New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973), p. xii.
18. Paul Horgan, "The Witch," in Folk-Say (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1930), pp. 197–211.
19. Paul Horgan, "Figures in a Landscape," in Folk-Say (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1931), p. 186.
20. Paul Horgan, "About the Southwest: A Panorama of Nueva Granada," Southwest Review, Special 50th Anniversary Issue, 59 (Autumn 1974): 362.
21. Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 3.
Selected Bibliography Primary Sources
"About the Southwest: A Panorama of Nueva Granada." Southwest Review 59 (Autumn 1974): 337–362.
"American Landscapes." The New Mexico Quarterly 6 (August 1936): 163–168.
A Distant Trumpet. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1960.
"Episodes from the Passionate Land." In Folk-Say: A Regional Miscellany, edited by B. A. Botkin. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1929.
"Erna Fergusson and New Mexico." In New Mexico: A Pageant of Three Peoples by Erna Fergusson. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973.
"Figures in a Landscape." In Folk-Say: A Regional Miscellany, edited by B. A. Botkin. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1931.
Figures in a Landscape. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940.
Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1954.
The Habit of Empire. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939.
The Heroic Triad. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.
"Indian Arts." The Yale Review 22 (September 1932): 205–208.
"In Search of the Archbishop." The Catholic Historical Review 46 (January 1961): 409–427.
Josiah Gregg and His Vision of the Early West. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.
Lamy of Santa Fe: His Life and Times. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.
Mexico Bay. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982.
Mountain Standard Time (includes Main Line West, Far from Cibola, and The Common Heart). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962.
"New Mexico." The Yale Review 23 (September 1933): 211–213.
New Mexico's Own Chronicle, ed. with Maurice Garland Fulton. Dallas: Banks Upshaw and Company, 1937.
No Quarter Given. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935. Peter Hurd: A Portrait Sketch from Life. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965.
The Peach Stone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967.
"The Pleasures and Perils of Regionalism" Western American Literature 8 (Winter 1974): 167–171.
The Return of the Weed. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1936.
The Saintmaker's Christmas Eve. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1955.
"A Tree on the Plains." Southwest Review 28 (Summer 1943): 345–376.
The Thin Mountain Air. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.
"Westward." Poetry 43 (December 1933): 144–149.
Whitewater. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970.
"Willa Cather and the Incalculable Distance." Unpublished address to the Century Association, April 25, 1978.
"The Witch." In Folk-Say: A Regional Miscellany, edited by B. A. Botkin. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1930.
Secondary Sources
Brogan, D. W. Introduction to Mountain Standard Time. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1962, pp. vii–x. Brogan sees Horgan as a regional novelist of the High Plains and Rockies–and of New York. But he sees his real theme as the human situation in society.
Carter, Alfred. "On the Fiction of Paul Horgan." The New Mexico Quarterly 7 (August 1937): 207–216. As a colleague of Horgan's at NMMI, Carter takes an important first look at the promise Horgan has as a fictionist after his first four novels. Carter thinks Horgan avoids "false antiquarian interests in the Southwest" such as local color quaintness and sets out to interpret America as fully as did Mark Twain.
Day, James M. Paul Horgan. Austin: Steck-Vaughn, 1967. Day's is a valuable survey study (the most comprehensive to date) of Horgan as a southwestern writer up to 1967. Marred somewhat by factual mistakes.
Gish, Robert. "Albuquerque as Recurrent Frontier in Paul Horgan's The Common Heart." New Mexico Humanities Review 3 (Summer 1980): 23–34. This essay attempts to illustrate how Horgan structures his book around interpolated stories which reinforce recurrent frontiers in history, place and individuals.
Hall, Jacqueline D. The Works of Paul Horgan. Deland, Florida: Everett/Edwards, Inc., Western American Writers Cassette Curriculum, 1976. A lecture on four novels: Main Line West, A Lamp on the Plains, The Common Heart and White-water. Hall contrasts what she sees as Horgan's attitudes toward Hispanic and Anglo conceptions of time and the spiritual and physical isolation of the plains.
Kraft, James. "No Quarter Given: An Essay on Paul Horgan." Southwestern Historical Quarterly 80 (July 1976):1–32. About the only "biography" of Horgan thus far.
Laird, W. David. Foreword to The Return of the Weed. Flagstaff: Northland Press, 1980, pp. xi–xviii. Brief summary of Horgan as a western writer relating to this reissue of Horgan's early volume of short stories.
Lindenau, Judith Wood. "Paul Horgan's Mountain Standard Time." South Dakota Review 1 (May 1964): 57–64. Comparative study of westering themes in Horgan's trilogy.
Pilkington, William T. "Paul Horgan."In My Blood's Country: Studies in Southwestern Literature. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1973, pp. 51–64. A short, clear-eyed book-by-book analysis of Horgan's southwestern fiction to 1960. Sees Horgan's shorter works as his most "powerful and esthetically complete." Regards The Return of the Weed as a novella.
Taylor, J. Golden, ed. "Paul Horgan,"and "The Western Novel–A Symposium," in The Literature of the American West. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1971, pp. 40–44. (Reprinted from South Dakota Review, Autumn 1964.) Valuable "interview" with well-considered responses by Horgan.
Westbrook, Max. Introduction to Far from Cibola. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974, pp. v–xiii. Points to Horgan's use of myth and symbol in the story and structure of Cibola.
Bibliographies
Kraft, James. "A Provisional Bibliography." In Approaches to Writing, by Paul Horgan. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.
McConnell, Richard M. M., and Susan A. Frey. "Paul Horgan: A Bibliography." Western American Literature 6 (Summer 1971): 137–150.
© Texas Christian University Press, 1998. All rights reserved.